Backup and Restore
Everyone should backup their information regularly, say every week. It's important because if something goes wrong with your iPad, you could lose all the information you've ever entered into Easy Books.
Automatic Backup
We know it's easy to forget to backup. We've developed a service that can help. It provides continuous online backup and synchronisation of your accounts between your iPad and iPhone. We call it Easy Books Sync. Should disaster happen, it's good to know you have a copy of your business accounts online. You can try out the service for two weeks for free.
Manual Backup
Making a manual backup of your business data is easy. You can run a backup manually and send the backup as an attached file in an email. When you later want to restore the backup, the iPhone 4 and iPad both allow you to tap on an attachment and send it into an app that handles that type of file. We like this, and it makes restoring an old backup very easy; just tap on the attachment in mail on the iPad, and it asks if you want to open it with Easy Books. Couldn't be simpler! This process works on all iOS devices running version iOS 3.2 and later.
To create a new backup, find the app settings screen and tap Backup.
The backup system exports the database with the file extension "easybooks_backup". Easy Books can open this file again when you double-click on it.
When producing the backup, you pick which of your businesses you want to include in the backup. You can also choose whether to include the app settings too. These settings contain your email address if you've set it, and any changes you might have made to the invoice labels. Backing up individual businesses is useful if you want to send a copy to a business partner without sending any other businesses or personal accounts.
The backup can be stored locally on the iPad, or emailed.
Manual Restore
You can restore direct from the email attachment in Mail, or you can use the app to view the available backups on the device. The backups stored on the device are available under Settings > Restore. You can place backup files on the device using iTunes file sharing. To restore a backup from an email, simply view the email in Mail, then tap on the attachment. Mail will ask you whether you want to open the attachment in Easy Books. If you do, the file is passed to Easy Books, and the restore process can start.
The backup file is opened and the businesses contained in it are listed. You can choose to restore any or all of the businesses contained in the backup. Similarly, if the backup contains settings, you can choose to overwrite your settings with those from the backup, or keep your own.
To go ahead with the restore, tap "Restore". If you are worried about overwriting an existing system, you can always produce a backup first, which will give you the option to restore later if you need to.